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End of Japanese community

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Re: End of Japanese community

#451

Post by Levitz »

OvbiousError wrote: post #436
denkmoon wrote: post #250

Ladybird and other browser alternatives cannot come fast enough. Every other week we've got a thread here about some stupid move Mozilla have made, I can't remember the last time I heard positive news about Mozilla.

There is a very loud part of HN that strongly dislikes mozilla/firefox. It's disproportionate imo, I don't understand why they're singled out so often.

Speaking for myself, it's really irritating to support a chrome alternative precisely because it's a chrome alternative and have it constantly shoot itself in the foot.

It sucks that I can't even attempt to convince someone to use it beyond "it's not Google", and data privacy. The vast majority of users won't ever give a damn about either of those by themselves.

Re: End of Japanese community

#452

Post by humanrebar »

apexalpha wrote: post #345
nozilla wrote: post #252

> Hi Marsf, > I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with. > My timezone is UTC+7, so it should be easier for us to set up time. Let me know how that sound! What a horribly condescending and patronising resp…

As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this. It just looks like someone trying to get in contact and help out. I could've written this myself, genuinely trying to help.

"I'm sorry" can mean "I am apologizing" but often it instead means "I feel bad". It depends on context which applies.

"I'm sorry for how you feel" without more explanation often sounds like "The thing that makes me feel bad in this situation is your reaction to it". It can come across as blaming the person for the feelings, regretting not being able to control others' feelings better, or dismissing the root causes of the feelings and any agency in them.

It's a bad apology because of the ambiguity, though passive aggressive types like that aspect. It's honestly a bad way to sympathize as well.

Re: End of Japanese community

#453

Post by yreg »

cryptonym wrote: post #416
bayindirh wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. English is also not my mother tongue, but this translates to "I'm sorry you feel like that, but we don't care or change anything, can I call you to convince you into doing things our way while completely being off the record?" in my mind. This is forceful and rude in my culture, but it's very rude and a no-…

> I'm sorry you feel like this Nope. Start by apologizing for the impact of what YOU did. Contributor of 20y just quit and provide a clear list of what is wrong. "your feelings" and "your struggles" is not respectful. You should be sorry that YOU pushed changes on them in a way that impacted badly their work and made them quit. Thank them for the feedback and try to open a discussion on finding a positive outcome.

But they might not be sorry.

Being sorry about how the bot works implies an intention to change/remove it.

Re: End of Japanese community

#454

Post by fragmede »

Almondsetat wrote: post #439
port11 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The response was condescending and very… American. The call ensures what, that you'll be more receiving to their grievances? That nothing is on the record? A lot of people don't want to jump in calls, ever. The initial response should've validated that the community feels slighted, that they should've brought them onboard for the decision making, etc. Acknowledging the mistake immediately seems like a good start.

>the response was condescending in your own opinion >and very American from an American company? that's what I'd expect. Should they have brought up some Japanese PR consultant just to reply to a community post? >acknowledging the mistake immediately Who says a mistake happened? You? Before apologizing maybe we should understand the problem?

> Should they have brought up some Japanese PR consultant just to reply to a community post?

Yes! It wouldn't even have had to have been a good one to have done a better job. Shit, just find the closest weeb and run it past them.

A developer relations person needs to understand developers so why shouldn't we expect the community person to understand the community they're interacting with?

Mozilla doesn't have the community goodwill to burn, it's hanging on by a thread - so not hiring someone with an idea if how to actually do that job would be penny wise pound foolish.

Re: End of Japanese community

#455

Post by jxf »

apexalpha wrote: post #345
nozilla wrote: post #252

> Hi Marsf, > I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with. > My timezone is UTC+7, so it should be easier for us to set up time. Let me know how that sound! What a horribly condescending and patronising resp…

As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this. It just looks like someone trying to get in contact and help out. I could've written this myself, genuinely trying to help.

As a native English speaker, "I'm sorry for how you feel" is patronizing. Genuine apologies acknowledge mistakes rather than invalidate feelings.

Re: End of Japanese community

#456

Post by StarGrit »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #421
apexalpha wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this. It just looks like someone trying to get in contact and help out. I could've written this myself, genuinely trying to help.

As a native English speaker, I don't see it as condescending either. Yes it's a bit "corporate" in tone, but that is not uncommon at all in large human organisations (not just for-profit corporations but also government, NGOs, political orgs, etc). Also the reality is that "hopping on a call" can often help to resolve problems that would otherwise devolve into months of bikeshedding on mailing lists. Which is often e…

I am English and the phrasing used is a backhanded way to tell you to shut-up and go away. I've seen it used by both native and non-native speakers in this manner.

It is about 50/50 though as many people don't seem to pick up on backhanded way that many English people speak.

> Also the reality is that "hopping on a call" can often help to resolve problems that would otherwise devolve into months of bikeshedding on mailing lists.

This is also sometimes done to shut you up as well.

Re: End of Japanese community

#457

Post by patcon »

glimshe wrote: post #444
bayindirh wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what cultural difference looks like. What sounds rude here sounds perfectly fine over there. While I have written that comment somewhat quickly, that's not AI at all, I can assure you about that. :)

You're touching the heart of the question, but not in the way you think. Any arbitrary statement could be construed as offensive by SOME culture out there. But people prefer to immediately assume the worst and be offended instead of giving others the benefit of the doubt. For instance, if I followed the principles of indignation culture, I could be offended by your "I can assure you about that :)" statement. I could…

It's not just the words that differ. Rudeness can come from underlying values betrayed by language, and those values do matter -- words aren't simply interchanged atop them.

Some cultures value relational power in leadership, and so their language reflects preserving relationships as a base resources. Some cultures value authority, and so their idea of being polite might involve some maintenance of authority at the expense of perceived care or relationship.

I'm just saying the words that convey rudeness are not necessarily just a superficial dressing on the same thing. Politeness is a shorthand that is also about alignment with a cultural value. Cultural values differ. My being annoyed at someone else's cultural posturing as default, that's not just mindless indignation. Values matter.

Re: End of Japanese community

#458

Post by MountainTheme12 »

numpad0 wrote: post #182
jameson wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> struggles with Japanese It doesn't mention mistranslating, so it's difficult to know the root of the problem is AI "struggling". > It doesn't follow our translation guidelines. > It doesn't respect current localization for Japanese users, so they were lost. I believe this is the root of the problem. There are define processes and guidelines, and LLM isn't following it. Whether these guidelines were prompted or not…

That's not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that LLMs just can't constitute a punctually Japanese understanding of text like that guideline and speak in Japanese with native fluency no matter what. I just know this from knowing both sides of English-Japanese language pair. And I find that somewhat fascinating in a sense.

I'm surprised by that. I use ChatGPT for communication with Japanese clients and I was mistaken for a native speaker more than once. I make almost no corrections other than changing the punctuation from western to fullwidth, although to be fair it's mostly simple and technical language.

Re: End of Japanese community

#459

Post by stOneskull »

gyomu wrote: post #18

As a multilingual/multicultural human it’s been pretty weird witnessing what AI translation has been doing to regional languages & cultures on the internet in the last few years. Sure we had machine translation before, but it was still a little off. Now the latest language models get us 99.9% there, so they are judged good enough to deploy at scale. What results is a weird twilight zone where everything is in your la…

> a weird culturally en-US biased soup (because that’s where the companies are headquartered and where the language models are trained)

i wonder why Sony doesn't train a Japanese model, or why some French company hasn't made a French one, etc.

Re: End of Japanese community

#460

Post by crote »

apexalpha wrote: post #345
nozilla wrote: post #252

> Hi Marsf, > I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with. > My timezone is UTC+7, so it should be easier for us to set up time. Let me know how that sound! What a horribly condescending and patronising resp…

As someone from the Netherlands I read absolutely 0 condescending or patronising behaviour in this. It just looks like someone trying to get in contact and help out. I could've written this myself, genuinely trying to help.

Also from The Netherlands, this is 100% condescending and patronising to me. I read this as corporate-speak for "go fuck yourself". Let's go through it line-by-line:

> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced.

"We have zero regrets about the changes we made and have no intention of making any changes - the problem is how you feel about them".

> Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?

"I can't be bothered to engage with the points you already raised. You can do some venting in a Teams call, but we don't want there to be a record so we can't be held to any promises we might accidentally make."

> We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.

"You are the problem: you haven't embraced our glorious changes yet. Accept our "help" to adapt to your new reality, or get out"

So no, that's not what you'd write if you genuinely wanted to help: that's what you write when you want to get rid of someone who is bothering you.

If they genuinely wanted to help, the response would've read something more like this:

> Dear marsf, > It is shocking to me to learn that our recent rollout of sumobot has caused enough friction to make a 20-year veteran of our community quit. Our intention has always been, and will always be, to use new technology like sumobot to help our communities - not harm them. Reading your report, we have clearly failed at that. > To prevent it from doing additional damage, we have chosen to pause sumobot for the moment. We still believe that it can become a valuable tool, but it'll remain paused until we have discussed its modes of operation and the impact it has on the way you contribute with representatives of the various communities. We'll work out an approach over the following weeks. > I hope this is sufficient for now to change your mind about leaving - people like you are essential to open-source applications like Firefox. If you wish to discuss it face-to-face, my team and I am more than happy to hop on a call with you to make sure we are doing the right thing.

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